Ethics complaint filed with medical board against Gitmo medical chief

The complaint was brought in Sacramento on Thursday against Capt. John S. Edmondson, a Navy officer who is licensed as a doctor in California. It maintains that Captain Edmondson has supervised a system in which doctors sometimes withhold medicine from prisoners if they are deemed not cooperative enough with their interrogators. The complaint does not assert that Captain Edmondson has been a direct participant in that effort, but says he is responsible for its occurrence.

The letter of complaint, filed by lawyers from the firm of Allen & Overy, notes that the military does not have an internal system for licensing of medical professionals but instead relies on a civilian board in each state. Military doctors are required to maintain their licenses with those boards.

The complaint stems from the lawyers’ interviews with four detainees alleging poor treatment. One of them, Abdul Khaliq Ahmed Saleh al-Baidhani, said in an affidavit: “Once I was complaining of constipation, and I was not able to go to the bathroom for 3-4 days. The doctor said that he will treat me when I talk to the interrogators.”

During his imprisonment, Begg got to know Muslim extremists who spoke of their anger at the United States. Some talked of attacks. Many were recruited by foreign radicals.

As members of the Muslim minority agonize over how some of their own might have caused such carnage and brace for revenge attacks, Begg — who denied U.S. allegations that he was an aide to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden — offers a glimpse at the possible motives.

Racism in Britain, non-assimilation in some communities, and anger over Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay might have been factors, the 37-year-old of Pakistani roots tells The Associated Press, six months after being released from the camp in Cuba. Britain negotiated his release along with three other British nationals.

Like many Muslims, Begg says he grew up in Birmingham — England’s second largest city and ethnically diverse — feeling the pull between Britain and Pakistan.

“I talked to many people who were self-declared members of al-Qaida while I was in Guantanamo, and there’s definitely indoctrination taking place in a lot of communities in Britain,” Begg said in a telephone interview with the AP while in London.

Begg described racism that he encountered when he was growing up in the 1980s. Some of his Pakistani friends were beaten up by skinheads, he says. “Almost everyone back then was harassed at some point for being dark-skinned, for being Pakistani,” he said.

But the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims was more acute in regions such as West Yorkshire, which includes Leeds, the northern city where at least three of the four suicide bombers in last week’s attacks are believed to have grown up. The fourth is believed to have been Jamaican-born.

Unlike Birmingham, Begg said pockets of West Yorkshire are dominated by immigrants from specific regions. Many of the groups have not assimilated into British culture, making it easier for radical recruiters to deepen the divide and fan hatred, he said.

The neighborhood where the three suicide bombers are thought to have come in Leeds — 185 miles north of London — is predominantly Pakistani.

Begg says many Muslims living in Britain have been recruited by Pakistani groups to study and fight in     Kashmir, a Himalayan border region that both India and Pakistan claim.

“Just like the military doesn’t recruit the old, these groups know to go after the young,” Begg said. “They’re stronger fighters; they’re more impressionable.”

Beyond targeting the young, however, Begg says other issues have fueled hatred in the community — particularly the issue of the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“That is the one issue that has unified the Muslim community recently,” says Begg, who is unemployed but working on a book about his time in Guantanamo. “Even though there are people from more than 40 countries there, most of them are Muslim and that’s what people talk about.”